The English and Portuguese colonists have peopled only the coasts which lie opposite to Europe; the Castilians, on the contrary, in the earliest period of the conquest, crossed the chain of the Andes and made settlements in the most western regions. There only, at Mexico, Cundinamarca, Quito and Peru, they found traces of ancient civilization, agricultural nations and flourishing empires. This circumstance, together with the increase of the native mountain population, the almost exclusive possession of great metallic wealth, and the commercial relations established from the beginning of the sixteenth century with the Indian archipelago, have given a peculiar character to the Spanish possessions in equinoctial America. In the East Indies, the people who fell into the hands of the English and Portuguese settlers were wandering tribes or hunters. Far from forming a portion of the agricultural and laborious population, as on the tableland of Anahuac, at Guatimala and in Upper Peru, they generally withdrew at the approach of the whites. The necessity of labour, the preference given to the cultivation of the sugar-cane, indigo, and cotton, the cupidity which often accompanies and degrades industry, gave birth to that infamous slave-trade, the consequences of which have been alike fatal to the old and the new world. Happily, in the continental part of Spanish America, the number of African slaves is so inconsiderable that, compared with the slave population of Brazil, or with that of the southern part of the United States, it is found to be in the proportion of one to fourteen. The whole of the Spanish colonies, without excluding the islands of Cuba and Porto Rico, have not, over a surface which exceeds at least by one-fifth that of Europe, as many negroes as the single state of Virginia. The Spanish Americans, in the union of New Spain and Guatimala, present an example, unique in the torrid zone, namely, a nation of eight millions of inhabitants governed conformably with European institutions and laws, cultivating sugar, cacao, wheat and grapes, and having scarcely a slave brought from Africa.